Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Ph.D., is an award winning artist, researcher, and writer. He received his Ph.D. in the Disruptive Design Team of the Networking and Telecommunications Research Group (NTRG), Trinity College Dublin. He is the Director of the Digital Humanities MA program and an Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Networked Culture in the department of Journalism, Communication, and Theatre at Lehman College (City University of New York – CUNY).

He has taught as adjunct assistant professor at Parsons MFA in Design & Technology and Parsons School of Art, Design, History, and Theory (ADHT) from 2010 to 2014. He has also taught in the Media, Culture, Communication dept of NYU Steinhardt School of Culture Education and Human Development (2009, 2010, 2011). He has also taught at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) (2007, 2008), and Trinity College’s MsC in Interactive Digital Media (2003, 2004). From 2001-2004 he was a Research Fellow in the Human Connectedness Group at Media Lab Europe and from 2006-2007 he was an R&D OpenLab Fellow at Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in New York City. He received his Masters from ITP in 1999 and was an Interval Research Fellow from 1999-2001.

Jonah’s work and thesis focuses on the theme of “Deconstructing Networks” which includes over 80 projects that critically challenge and subvert accepted perceptions of network interaction and experience.

He is co-founder of the Dublin Art and Technology Association (DATA Group), recipient of the ARANEUM Prize sponsored by the Spanish Ministry of Art, Science and Technology and Fundacion ARCO, and was a 2006 and 2008 Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellow Nominee. His writing has appeared in numerous international publications including WIRED Magazine, Make Magazine, Neural, Rhizome.org, Art Asia Pacific, Gizmodo and more, and his work has been presented at events and organizations such as DEAF (03,04), London Science Museum (2008), Future Sonic / Future Everything (2004, 2009), Art Futura (04), SIGGRAPH (00,05), UBICOMP (02,03,04), CHI (04,06) Transmediale (02,04,08), NIME (07), ISEA (02,04,06,09,12), Institute of Contemporary Art in London (04), Tate Modern (03), Whitney Museum of American Art’s ArtPort (03, 12), Ars Electronica (02,04,08), Chelsea Art Museum, ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art (04-5),Museum of Modern Art (MOMA – NYC)(2008),San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) (2008), and Palais Du Tokyo, Paris (2009). His work has been reported about in The Times, The New York Times, Wired News, Make, Boing Boing, El Pais, Gizmodo, Engadget, The Register, Slashdot, NY Post, The Wire, Rhizome, Crunch Gear, Beyond the Beyond, Neural, Liberation, Village Voice, IEEE Spectrum, The Age, Taschen Books, and more.

Molly Dilworth, 547 West 27th Street (2009). From the series "Paintings for Satellites."

In the early 2000s, as location-aware devices first became commonplace, there was a lot of hype surrounding their potential creative use by artists. However, over time, this initial enthusiasm for "locative media"--projects that respond to data or communications technologies that refer to particular sites--leveled off, even dissipated. Regardless of this drought, geospatial technologies are widely used, and play an important and often unnoticed role in conditioning many aspects of our existence. Responding to this condition of ubiquity, artists have continued to use locative technologies critically, opening up closed systems, making their effects visible, and reconfiguring our relationship with such systems.

A kind of cold weather antipode of summer's "Love Parade," the Transmediale 2014 media arts festival was a beacon of light in the long dusk of a Berlin winter. As a twist on the usual curated exhibition, this year's festival opted for an ad-hoc "Art Hack Day" (AHD) approach, where submitting artists were expected to create new and original artworks in the span of two days (and nights). Opening the exhibition with a more down-to-earth feel, AHD ultimately resembled a DIY, garage-style party instead of a highbrow exhibition space.

As the iPhone just celebrated its fifth year on the market, artists have already made a substantial dent in the commercially lucrative world of Apple’s AppStore. Despite this success, artists are still pushing forward to build apps that further integrate with the device’s sensors and location-based capabilities. Rather than working solely within the context of software art as I have covered in two previous articles on the subject for Rhizome, there is a focus now on artists who are interacting with the physical world by using the device’s internal sensors, location capabilities, constant Internet connectivity, and built-in cameras.

Using the camera as a sensor, “Konfetti” by German based designer Stephan Maximillian Huber visualizes the image of its subject into countless dots. In effect, the camera image is translated into virtual confetti that follows any movement and creates an ever changing images based on which camera is selected. The dot’s movement is correlated to the detected flow captured by the camera and by repelling other dots, which also move as you touch and drag them. Huber explains over email how the app works as a reflection based art tool. “The app started as an iPad-only app, and on an iPad the app acts like a mirror, showing an abstract reflection of yourself. You'll get a clear image of yourself only when you concentrate on the process of the app, and don't move too fast. It's like contemplating about yourself and the image of yourself. And as your thoughts and emotions aren't static the image the app generates is dynamic and adapts to minimal movements and new ...

In the summer of 2009, I wrote an article here at Rhizome about the burgeoning activities of media artists creating new works or updating versions of their older interactive screen-based projects for Apple's iPhone and iTouch mobile devices. As the article made its way throughout the blogosphere, comments surfaced ranging from criticism of the "closed world of Apple's App Store and iPhone devices" to a championing of the availability of inexpensive multi-touch technology now available to artists who had been waiting for a platform that could adequately display and allow for the type of interaction their projects demanded. A year after the article came out, the draw of these devices and their potentially expansive audience has become even more irresistible to artists enough so that several more "apps" have surfaced. The following article catalogs several new iPhone works which have emerged over the past year, works that are pioneering the next generation of portable media art.

Jonah Brucker-Cohen is a researcher, artist, professor and writer. His writing has appeared in numerous international publications including WIRED Magazine, Make Magazine, Neural, Rhizome, Art Asia Pacific, Gizmodo and more, and his work has been shown at events such as DEAF (03,04), Art Futura (04), SIGGRAPH (00,05), UBICOMP (02,03,04), CHI (04,06) Transmediale (02,04,08), NIME (07), ISEA (02,04,06,09), Institute of Contemporary Art in London (04), Whitney Museum of American Art's ArtPort (03), Ars Electronica (02,04,08), Chelsea Art Museum, ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art (04-5),Museum of Modern Art (MOMA - NYC)(2008), and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) (2008). He received his Ph.D. in the Disruptive Design Team of the Networking and Telecommunications Research Group (NTRG), Trinity College Dublin. He is an adjunct assistant professor of communications at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) and in the Media, Culture, Communication dept of NYU Steinhardt School of Culture Education and Human Development.

2009 was an important year for the Internet as a whole. The advent of web 2.0 and "crowdsourcing" initiatives has enabled a much richer array of content from users who might never have ventured onto the Internet in previous years. My top 10 sites for this year cover a wide range of topics from art made for mobile devices with iPhoneArt.org to evidence of both information saturation with Information Aesthetics and physical and pseudo intellectual abundance with This is Why You're Fat and There I Fixed It, to strange observances of mistakes in the public realm with Fail Blog. In addition to these crowdsourced content sites, I also see some ongoing potential with artist-created sites such as Brett Domino's lowtech approach to music making ...

About SimpleTEXT:SimpleTEXT is a collaborative audio/visual public performance that relies on audience participation through input from mobile devices such as phones, PDAs or laptops. SimpleTEXT focuses on dynamic input from participants as essential to the overall output. The performance creates a dialogue between participants who submit messages which control the audiovisual output of the installation. These messages are first parsed according to a code that dictates how the music is created, and then rhythmically drive a speech synthesizer and a picture synthesizer in order to create a compelling, collaborative audiovisual performance.

SimpleTEXT focuses on mobile devices and the web as a bridge between networked interfaces and public space. As mobile devices become more prolific, they also become separated by increased emphasis on individual use. The SimpleTEXT project looks beyond the screen and isolated usage of mobile devices to encourage collaborative use of input devices to both drive the visuals and audio output, inform each participant of each other's interaction, and allows people to actively participate in the performance while it happens.Our purpose with the performance is to create the possibility of large-scale interaction through anonymous collaboration, with immediate audio and visual feedback. SimpleTEXT encourages users to respond to one another's ideas and build upon the unexpected chains of ideas that may develop from their input..

Support/Sponsors:SimpleTEXT is created by Family Filter, a collaboration between Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Tim Redfern, and Duncan Murphy. It was originally funded by a commission from Low-Fi, a new media arts organization based in London, UK and has been performed in 5+ countries worldwide. This event is sponsored by NYU's Program Board and the "Handheld" show.

In the heat of the LA summer, SIGGRAPH 2005 opened its doors to 50,000+ computer graphics technologists, animators, musicians, artists, geeks, curators, and digital media professionals. This year's Art gallery and emerging tech sections featured hundreds of projects that aimed to showcase the "future" of computer graphics and interaction. Since I was active in this year's conference, I didn't get a chance to visit every presentation or try every demo, but here is a report from the projects and talks that I saw.

This year's main event was the keynote address by acclaimed filmmaker and special effects innovator, George Lucas. Widely considered as the "father of digital cinema", Lucas proclaimed himself as a storyteller before anything else. In order to realize the worlds he envisioned he turned to computers as an enabling technology. He calmly stated that he was "not a computer person" and had "no idea what SIGGRAPH people do." He referenced Akira Kurosawa as a filmmaker who triumphs in creating an illusion that fantasy worlds exist and proclaimed the secret to this as "immaculate reality." Lucas's humble moment was when he admitted to the audience, "I don't know how you do this stuff, but it allows me to tell a story so I'm happy you're doing it."

On the ground floor of the convention center was the SIGGRAPH Art Gallery: "Threading Time", which featured a wide range of interactive and other digital artworks from artists around the world. On the wall in a red frame was Boredom Research's "Ornamental Bug Garden" a small, animated screen-based ecosystem that reacted as visitors approached. Also interactive was Camille Utterback's "Untitled 5: External Measures Series", a collage of painterly shapes and images that animated according to visitors movements tracked from overhead. On the opposite was John Gerrard's "Watchful Portrait", a 3D portrait that followed the sun's ascent and descent. On the other side of the wall Gerrard's "Saddening Portrait" was another 3D figure who's face gradually saddened over a 100-year period. Perry Hoberman's "Art Under Contract" consisted of a large metal case on the wall with a small, motor controlled shutter door. After each visitor clicked the "agree" button of a simple contract, the door would open exposing the art, but then suddenly shut after the viewing time was over. This project was a good example of a piece of media art controlling its viewing audience.

In the "Emerging Technologies" section, projects ranged from new types of interactive displays to tactile control mechanisms for interacting with the screen to more artistic uses of technology. The highlight of the show was Japanese artist Toshio Iwai's (in collaboration with Yamaha) "Tenori-On" a physical interface that allows people to create musical compositions visually by pressing on a dense array of lighted buttons. The instrument's simple, yet elegant output was a nice reminder that the increasing complexity of digital interfaces often clouds basic creativity. Other interesting creative projects included "Exhale: Breath Between Bodies" a series of networked skirts that collected the breath of the wearers and transmitted the data to fans in corresponding skirts.

Upstairs from the keynote, art galleries, and other lecture rooms, the Guerrilla Studio was a place where visitors to the event could create projects from various different media. I co-ran a workshop there with Katherine Moriwaki called "DIY Wearable Challenge", co-hosted by the Ludica Gaming Atelier, where we invited conference attendees to create simple wearable projects in a few hours from basic electronics and sensors. The best creations made their way to the cyber fashion show, hosted later on at the event. This type of dynamic creativity was evident in other areas of the studio where visitors could create board games, 3D prints of designs, and even on-the spot motion capture animations.

As the conference continued, I managed to attend a few of the panels and presentations. The ISEA 2006 meeting was an organizational meeting and open forum for the upcoming ISEA symposium and media art event in San Jose at the end of 2006. The panel featured curator Steve Dietz, Cynthia Beth Rubin, Peter Anders and others involved with the conference's organization and curation. In addition to speaking about the ISEA event, the panel was also meant to launch "01 San Jose", a new, US based bi-annual media arts festival to take place in San Jose. The prospect of a larger festival occurring in northern California is nice evidence that there is still money left in Silicon Valley.

Moving into West Hall B, the "Extreme Fashion" special session included speakers working with fashion and technology from varied disciplines. International Fashion Machines (IFM) founder Maggie Orth began with a presentation about the definition of extreme fashion and how the true fashion technology object includes input, processing and some type of display mechanism. She gave the example of the "Voltaic Jacket" which includes solar panels on its back to harness power to charge portable data devices worn on the body. Orth saw the main roadblocks to wearable technology as 1) No standards of wash ability 2.) Little commercial activity and 3.) lack of good display materials. Professor Thad Starner of Georgia Tech spoke about his "Free Digiter", proximity sensing device can detect simple movements of its wearer and be mapped to control functions such as volume levels on car and portable MP3 players. Dr. Jenny Tillotson spoke about her "Second Skin Dress" which attempts to "create a personal scent bubble around the wearer". This would help to prevent bad moods and add an emotional quality to everyday experience. Elise Co of Minty Monkey showed some of her current work including the "Lumiloop" bracelet that illuminates based on patterns created by its wearer and the UFOS shoes that light up according to specified movements. "Your outfit shouldn't be the technology, this is something that could go with the rest of your stuff" explained Co. Also on the panel was Katherine Moriwaki who spoke about her PHD work into "Social Fashioning" and several of her projects that monitor the environment and attempt to create social relationships between people occupying similar spaces.

This session ended as the "SIGGRAPH Cyber Fashion" show began. The show, hosted by wearable tech artist and enthusiast, Isa Gordon of Psymbiote, featured a collection of wearables that resembled everything from a post-Tron utopia to a trip to the Sharper Image. Every model on the floor had a piece of electroluminescent glow wire as standard garb. Some of the highlights included Luisa Paraguai Donati's "Vestis: Affective Bodies" a full body suit with tubes surrounding the wearer that expanded and contracted as personal body space and "comfort zone" was infringed upon. Similarly, Simona Brusa Pasque's "Beauty and the Beast" is a pair of plexiglass shoes that include a stun gun embedded in the toe of one, and an alarm system in the other activated by wearer stamping their feet. Overall there was an interesting mix of clothing that reacted to outside stimuli and those that protected its wearer.

As SIGGRPH 2005 came to a close, the conference seemed to be stuck in a continual challenge between how to smoothly integrate the corporate graphics world into the fringe artistic spectrum. This was evident with the chaotic scene at the Cyber Fashion show and the low level of artistic input into the Electronic Theater. The panels seemed more dense with artistic input this year, but the separation between disciplines seemed more evident as crossover participation waned. Perhaps if the new ZeroOne conference in San Jose is successful it will draw the artistic spectrum away from SIGGRAPH and let it regain focus back onto the graphics industry. I guess time will have to be the instigator in that debate.

Held for the first time outside of the US, the 4th annual "Artbots: The Robot Talent Show" took place in Saints Michael and John church in Dublin, Ireland. During an unusually warm summer in Dublin, the yearly event showcased over 20 projects from 10 countries ranging from kinetic art-producing robots to solar robot and scrapyard sound workshops. Organized by Douglas Irving Repetto and curated this year with Michael John Gorman and Marie Redmond, the event featured an even more international group of artists than from previous years coming from as far as South America, Europe, US, and the Middle East. The show was held in conjunction with the larger, summer-long "Save The Robots" festival about the culture and history of robots organized by The Ark, a cultural center for children located in the heart of Dublin's Temple Bar district.

Upon entering the venue, visitors were greeted by Venezuelan artist Elias Crespin's "Malla Electrocinetica #1", a mesh of 64 nodes hanging from the ceiling that subtly moved in a wave above the entrance stairwell. This piece's delicate movements were as intricate as they were beautiful and precise. Moving further along the first level and down the hall was Will Tremblay and Rob Gonsalves' "Wave Puppet", a physical simulation of waves across the ocean's surface. Following a similar aesthetic to Crespin's work, the project was built from a combination of servomotors, acrylic walls, and a rubber surface that bent forward and backwards like a steady moving wave.

As the entrance hallway extended, there were two workshops that allowed visitors to the event to build their own robots or musical instruments. Ralf Schreiber and Tina Tonagel's "60 minutes bot" workshop integrated simple electronic components including wires, electric motors and solar panels to create simple bots that exhibited varied movements based on their exposure to light in a small exhibit space. The second workshop, which I ran with Katherine Moriwaki, was called "MIDI Scrapyard Challenge" and allowed visitors to create musical controllers out of cast off or discarded materials found in local junk shops and in the refuse bin of local computer labs. Both workshops engaged participants from varied age groups to get involved in the creation of robots and electronic instruments with little or no previous knowledge of electronics.

Further down the hallway along the walls was "Sketch of a field of grass (dunes, Pacific Coast, 2005)" by Ryan Wolfe. The project consisted of a row of mechanically controlled blades of grass that responded to each other's movements mimicking a breeze blowing through a field. The simplicity of this array of grass was a nice reminder of how natural movements can be emulated through simple motorized controllers. Across the walkway was Amanda Parkes and Jessica Banks's "Curiously Strong", an array of 250 mechanically controlled Altoid's tins that opened and closed as a large kinetic sculpture.

Moving into the main exhibition space, robots exhibited ranged from those that created art as a byproduct of their movements to those that questioned the very definition of mechanical or autonomous art. Bruce Shapiro's "Ribbon Dancer" was two long metal arms mounted on a banister that moved wildly around the space with ribbons attached to the ends. Their actions resulted in a lively and fluid stream of animated fabric high in the air. Further along the far wall was Sabrina Raaf's "Translator II: Grower", a mechanical robot that measured carbon dioxide levels in the room and drew green blades of grass of varying heights along the walls. This type of immediate analysis of the environment was a nice constant reminder of our own physical output manifested by the machine. Further across the room was local Dublin artist Peter O'Kennedy's "Escape", a collection of 15 small mouse-shaped robots all attempting to move towards a single passageway that was only big enough for one of them. This simple concept proved addictive to watch as the small bots scurried towards an awkward freedom.

Though not a competition, Artbots awards two prizes each year: one to the artist's choice and one for the audience choice. This year's audience favorite was Garnet Hertz's "Cockroach-controlled Mobile Robot #2". Hertz's robot consisted of a large Madagascan Hissing Cockroach perched atop a modified trackball that controlled a three-wheeled robot. As the cockroach tried to move forward, its feet caught on the trackball, pushing the robot ahead. Thus allowing the roach to "drive" the robot around depending on its activity. This bot got a lot of stares from pedestrians as Hertz took it out to a local square to give it more space to manouver. The artist's favorite prize was awarded to Elias Crespin's kinetic mobile described earlier.

Also located in the main exhibition space was the masochistic "Shockbot Corejulio", a computer-based device that affected its own behavior by placing a piece of metal over its exposed circuit board. With each touch from the metal, the bot consequently "shocked" itself causing the graphics output of the screen to change. The resulting display resembled a Mondrian painting which became more and more abstract the further the bot was shocked. Moving down into the basement of the church, "Nervous", by Bjoern Schuelke, consisted of small, bright orange, furry objects that coated the walls of the space. As you got closer and touched them, they began to shake and emit nervous sounds. This project was a nice simulation of the "human side" to artificial life and a reminder of the "fragility" of automated creatures.

As the show came to a close, it was evident that automated or mechanized art is not dependent on the creation itself. Most of the work in the show came to life with audience involvement and through the individual perception each participant and author brought to the works. Throughout its four year existence, Artbots has presented a sample of work that re-defines what "robotic art" is or how it could be perceived (see the website for a list of all works included). Each of the works in this year's show were unique reminders that technological art can produce the same visceral reaction usually associated with traditional art forms. The kinetic nature of the works adds a relational aspect for the viewer who can project their own experience on the piece. This remarkable quality to the work and high standard of curation from a yearly open call, has turned Artbots into one of the most unique and eclectic electronic art festivals worldwide.

In the sweltering heat of the Chicago summer, Wired Magazine's NextFest took place on Navy Pier, the city's entertainment center. Billed as "the next world's fair", the 2nd annual Next Fest (last year's event took place in San Francisco and next year's will be in New York City) was a mixture of corporate ecology culture and artistic interventions into visions of the future.

NextFest was split up into 7 categories examining projects in the future of "Exploration, Transportation, Security, Health, Entertainment, Design, and Communication." Notable projects in this year's fest included the "Entertainment" category's "Kick Ass Kung Fu", a full body Kung Fu game where participants step on a platform and fight 2D assailants. Camera tracking on movements puts players into the game screen. Other projects such as Robot Lab's "Jukebots" were repurposed car manufacturing robots that spin and scratch records on turntables. It was nice to see a combination of hi-tech robotics next to the very "low-tech" medium of vinyl (especially since many of the kids attending the event might not even know what a "vinyl record" was. Also on the floor was "Musicbox", a souped up version of the classic music windup toy where instead of metal pins, used bright LEDs

On the subject of kids, the Future of Exploration pavilion featured "STINKY" a submersible robot built by the Falcon robotics team at Carl Hayden High School in Arizona. Their project was featured in WIRED in an article called "La Vida Robot", as their hand-crafted robot beat MIT researchers in the "national underwater bot championship". Nearby, in the "Transportation" pavilion, was the "Moller Skycar", a flying car that looks like a 1950s red baron bomber. Videos playing beside it showed the car in action, but I have a feeling you have to be present at a test flight to really believe in it as the future of transportation.

The "Future of Health" pavilion was perhaps the most bizarre of all the collections of projects on display. Here you could see a set of real-live "cloned" cats. Also on display was Luminetx's "Veinviewer", an infrared light that when projected on the patient identifies which veins are suitable for injection or blood withdrawal. Also the "Power Assist Suit" by Japan's Kanagawa Institute of Technology is a full-body hydraulic outfit that assists senior citizens or handicapped people by calculating how much air to release to the "muscles" based on sensor input from the wearer's limbs. There was even a cyborg of Science fiction writer Phillip K. Dick that understood natural language enough for visitors to ask him questions. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to ask what the next Hollywood inflated-budget remake of his novels would be? Oh well, maybe next time.

Across the room from Health was the "Future of Design", which featured projects that attempted to seamlessly integrate technology into everyday experience. Sweden's Interactive Institute showed their "Energy Curtain" an augmented curtain that stores energy from the sun on flexible solar panels during the day and lights up the opposite side at night. Also integrating technology into fabric was "Urban Chameleon", a set of computationally enhanced skirts that monitored air quality, movement, and touch and displayed them on the surface of the garments. Adding interaction into the mix, the "Future of Communication" featured projects that examined how technology will (and has already) change (d) the way we connect to people over distance and within close proximity. The "Acceleglove" by students at George Washington University, is a glove that translates sign language into written characters and speech to allow for a type of "dictation tool" for the deaf. Also here was "Mobile Feelings" by artists Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau. The project consisted of two gourds that that allowed each user to share their pulse rates with each other across a minimal distance.

Finally, the "Security" pavilion focused on projects that demonstrated how "secure" we might be if we had devices that could detect unwanted visitors from miles away and conduct automated background checks on them as they approached. One of the more interesting projects was "Brain Fingerprinting", a device with electrodes that monitors brain activity and can detect when the person recognizes an image they had previously seen. Forget lie detectors, in the future nothing will be a secret.

As this year's NextFest came to a close, the question remained as to how much of this "techno fetishism" stuff will ever make it to market? When will I be able to walk into my local car dealer and take a test "fly" in the Moller Sky Car? If the future is closer than we think, this might be something that will happen in our lifetime. If not, we might find out what's "next" by dreaming it up in a bathroom stall. In any case, Wired's world fair of sorts was a good reminder that we are heading towards the future at an accelerated pace. The question that still needs addressing is: What will we do once we get there?

Held over a week and located in Helsinki, Tallinn, and a Baltic Sea-roving cruise liner, ISEA 2004 was a marathon media arts conference like none other. With over 1,500 artists taking part in panels, performances, fashion shows, keynotes, and installations, there was little time for sleep among all of the commuting between venues. The conference's theme examined the crossover between wireless culture, wearable or fashionable technology, and networked experience. ISEA 2004 aimed to explore themes surrounding critical notions of interaction design, open source software culture, and geopolitics of media. This approach attempted to challenge accepted notions of interaction by focusing on possibilities of re-appropriation instead of mere re-evaluation. Although the conference schedule was an often strenuous journey through multiple cities and events, the discussions, interventions, and realizations that manifested contributed to an exhilarating experience.

The festival officially began aboard the "Networked Experience" Baltic sea cruise (I missed the Koneisto sound event the night before in Helsinki), where the focus was on how networked culture iterates human understanding through shared experiences such as email lists, collective performance, interactive narrative, and GPS sound installations. The panel entitled "The List: The mailing list phenomena", began in the Metropolitan ballroom of the ship, with a panel of list-serve moderators such as Melinda Rackham of Empyre, Kathy Rae Huffman of Faces, Axel Bruns of Fibre Culture, and Charlotte Frost who is studying list culture for her Ph.D. thesis. Examining networked culture, the debate centered around the nurturing of lists and what types of communication technologies are appropriate for specific communities. I spoke on the challenges of my BumpList project as an example of an email community that focuses on shifting the structure of a system to change its participants behaviors. Other panels and events focused on community awareness in digital media projects like "E-Tester" and UNESCO meetings with African and Asian award winners and participants.

Arriving bewildered and tired in the city of Tallinn, Estonia, the "Wearable Experience" theme of ISEA began with a keynote from Concordia University's Joanna Berzowska. Her talk was an overview of wearable trends and projects that aimed to challenge traditional notions of strapped-on gadgetry by emphasizing the integration of sensors and displays into clothing. Her own research on "Memory Rich Garments" showed how everyday emotions and intimacy could be projected and enhanced through computationally enhanced clothing that stores non-personal data about people it comes into contact with. Other panels focused on the how technology and fashion can integrate into networks, how clothing can act as a display for portable signage, or how intimacy could be conveyed over distance. This discussion continued to Helsinki's "Wireless Experience" theme, which began as hundreds of ISEA attendees were stuck in passport control after arriving on the SuperSeaCat ferry from Tallinn. Machiko Kusahara of Japan's Waseda University opened the conference with a keynote address on mobile phone culture in Japan. Her focus centered around how "socially acceptable" mobile phone or "ketai" use had become and how advertisements for services emphasized how "left out" of mainstream culture people have become without a phone. Although her talk emphasized the social pressures of technology, it left out dangers of extended mobile phone use or the advent of surveillance culture. These questions were made more evident through the many parallel sessions over the next few days.

The second keynote by the Sarai New Media Initiative's Shuddhabrata Sengupta focused around the conference theme of "Histories of the New" and how reinventing the future is often tied to lessons from the past. His talk "The Remains of Tomorrows Past: Speculations on the Antiquity of New Media Practice in South Asia", presented the history of technical networks from the telegraph to the Internet. His talk referenced Tom Standage's book "The Victorian Internet" to illustrate how these information networks are not new and how they simply provide frameworks for a centralized space that expands global discourse. UCLA's Erkki Huhtamo, followed this talk with his take on the "Archaeology of Mobile Media", or how media does not exist independently from the social framework that envelops them. He showed imagery of the amateur photographer of the early 20th century comparing the public perception of this "nuisance" to the current mobile phone camera phenomenon: both seen as invasions of privacy and unwanted surveillance in the hands of the people.

Following this theme, the GPS art panel, moderated by San Francisco based-artist Marisa Olsen, attempted to ground location-based media projects into a defined genre. The current ghettoization of media art into technology-defined categories like GPS or Wi-Fi tends to counter creativity at its roots. Instead the focus should be on crystallizing an idea so that the technology becomes less awkward and central to the output. Projects discussed included Pall Thayer's "Hlemmur in C" that tracked taxi movements through GPS and composed real-time soundtracks based on their position in the city, Joel Slayton's (of the C5 collective) mapping of altitudes on the Great Wall of China to plot where it could have been built in California, and Teri Rueb's "Trace" which allows people to discover location-based sound clips embedded into positions on a nature trail in Canada. In a sense, most of the work in this area centers on GPS enabling you find or discover things in your environment or enabling people or devices to find you. Little was mentioned about the surveillance aspects of tracking or the social aspects of why this technology is becoming pervasive?

Filling in the hard theory was keynote speaker Wendy Hui Kyong Chun of Brown University who spoke on "Control and Freedom: Interactivity as a Software Effect". Her talk was probably the most seminal moment of the conference as it connected up the central themes. Chun emphasized the role of technology as a contributor to social stigma especially in networked culture and outlined how surveillance is becoming a visual and territorial metaphor for control. Her breakdown of the utopian view that current software assumes that users cannot understand computation showed explicitly how layers of mediation between code and interface are getting thicker. Nina Wakeford of the University of Surrey spoke on "Identity Politics of Mobility and Design Culture", focusing on the importance of local knowledge with examples of projects that emphasized aspects of mobility as a driving force in design.

The exhibitions scattered around Tallinn and Helsinki showcased everything from fashion tech and accessories to social and political projects, to interactive installations and data visualizations. Some impressive projects included Bundith Phunsombatlert's "Path of Illusion", a series of street lamps with rotating LED displays that passerbyers could type into rounded keyboards at the base of the lights. Also meant to display information in public space was Steve Heimbecker's "POD (Wind Array Cascade Machine)" which consisted of sixty four air flow sensors in Montreal that transmitted data to towers of LEDs that resembled a large-scale graphic equalizer. Also interesting was Diego Diaz's "Playground" which turned a kids merry-go-round into a collective joystick to navigate a shared 3D space. I think someone got overexcited and broke the piece midway through. In Tallinn, the wearable showcase features Tina Gonsalves and Tom Donaldson's "Medulla Intimata", video jewelry that changes depending on the emotional state of the wearer and the conversations in which they are engaged. Other projects such as Kelly Dobson's "ScreamBody" which consists of a bag you scream into and release the sound later, Sabrina Raaf's "Saturday" which used gloves with bone transducers to hear sampled CB radio conversations through your cheekbones, and "Seven Mile Boots" by Laura Beloff, Erich Berger and Martin Pichlmair that allows people to traverse chat rooms by walking around a physical space. Overall the projects in the show examined how wearable technology can impact and change our environment, personal experience and social landscape.

As ISEA ended, most people were thoroughly exhausted. Although the constant shifting of venues, cities, and themes might have contributed to this, the questions raised by the presentations and exhibitions remained strong throughout the event. Why is interaction engaging? Is there a larger message involved? How do creative systems and practice filter up to decision and policy makers to provoke and result in global action? With diverse speakers such as the Sarai Collective's challenge to the hegemony of the digital art canon and Mark Tribe open-sourcing his presentation online so that people could "remix" it after his talk, the conference presented a wide array of contrasting opinions that attempted to make sense of the current media arts landscape. With so many perspectives, the endpoint seemed scattered but also manageable. The more we question the fundamental reasons why technology is important, the more we discover why we cannot live without it. Only through events like ISEA can we really come to grips with this realization.